Technical Writing

A shipping company had approximately 150 procedures with a total of approximately 2000 pages. During the life of the procedures, many changes were made to the procedures, and a full re-write was necessary.

For this project, more personnel were necessary:

Fleet Director

Marine Engineer

Master Mariner

An editor who knows simplified English and American English.

The source procedures had these language problems

The source procedures had many problems:

The procedures were too long. On average, each procedure was 13 pages.

The visual design was bad.

The Microsoft Word template contained many unnecessary styles.

The remaining part of this section is about problems that are related to the language.

Instructions are not clear

Sentence structure is complex and instructions are not clear

The source procedures were written by marine experts, not by technical writers. Sentences were too complex and there were no clear instructions, as this example shows: